Dark Days Challenge 2010 - Week 6

I've had several dark days meals this week.  I took out a chicken from the freezer (1 down, still 5 left in there!) and roasted it for dinner.  I always make chicken noodle soup with the leftovers but this time, I decided to mix things up a little and make chicken barley soup.  My son said "barley?" in that suspicious tone of what is my mother trying to do to me.

Last week, we had a day or two of pretty mild weather so I ran over to the garden to see if the ground was soft enough to dig up some parsnips. It was, just barely.  So the soup has some yummy parsnips in it.

I took all the meat off the bones and threw the bones into a pot with some water and simmered a couple of hours.  After that, the soup was easy to put together.

Saute some shallots (from my garden) and roasted garlic (frozen, from garden).  Add carrots and parsnips (garden) along with broth.  I had cooked the barley (sadly, not local - seriously, where does barley come from?) ahead of time, so once the carrots and parsnips were soft, added cooked barley and chopped chicken. Heat, season with salt and pepper.  I made popovers to go with them and almost all the ingredients were local for that.  Milk, eggs, butter from South Mountain Creamery and flour from Wade's Mill.

The next morning was another local meal for breakfast.  I had thawed some link sausage from my heritage hog and cooked it up and made scrambled eggs.  The eggs and cream were from South Mountain Creamery.